Why did Paul Levi lose out in the German Communist leadership?

July 5, 2013

By John Riddell. Paul Levi’s career as a leader of the German Communist party was brilliant but brief. Before the party was founded, at the end of 1918, he was a close associate of both Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. When Luxemburg was killed in 1919, he became the German Communist Party’s foremost leader. He headed the process through which it became a mass party at the end of 1920. Yet only four months later he was expelled from the party.

What explains his sudden downfall? I will address just one aspect of this story: the influence of shifts in the ranks of the German working class.

Paul Levi, 1920

First of all, let me provide a summary of events during the months when Paul Levi left the Communist International. I will do this through the eyes of a young rank-and-file Communist participant in these events whom I came to know forty years after they took place. The words are mine, but they are consistent with how my friend saw things.

A view from the ranks of Levi’s fall

In October 1920, we finally achieved unity with the majority of the centrist USPD. We now had 375,000 members, many times more than before. Our fusion convention resolved that we were now strong enough to undertake actions on our own.

Much to my shock, Paul Levi and his team in the party leadership then published an Open Letter offering to join in struggle with the hated Social Democrats around limited immediate demands. Needless to say, the Social Democrats turned this down. Our campaign for the Open Letter led to gains in the trade unions, but it was a far cry from the socialist revolution I felt was possible.

But life is full of surprises. A month later, Levi and his team left the leadership. It seems he had supported Serrati, a discredited centrist, in a split in our Italian section. But the real issue was Levi’s passivity, his excessive caution.

The new crew stepped up our calls for confrontational action. They were hoping that tensions between Germany and the countries that won the First World War would boil over, enabling us to overturn the government. Our papers started calling on workers to pick up the gun.

Well, the international tensions did not explode. Instead, the Social Democrats marched police into Central Germany, an area where we were strong. But a protest strike spread through the region, and then, suddenly, forces outside our party launched a guerrilla war. Police reinforcements arrived, with machine guns and artillery, and resistance was drowned in blood.

Our party had to respond. It called a general strike for overthrow of the government. That is what became known as our March Action. The strike was a failure. By and large, it did not even mobilize our members, let alone the class as a whole. We fought pitched battles against non-Communist workers.

Levi published a pamphlet denouncing our strike. He was immediately expelled. Meanwhile, our leadership said our action was a great success and had to now be followed up by more of the same. They carried that idea into our World Congress, calling it the “theory of the offensive.”

Yet even as they got on the train to Moscow, back in Germany, the party resumed initiatives similar to Levi’s Open Letter.

As for the world congress, it was hard to figure out. Levi’s expulsion was endorsed. But, curiously, Levi’s cautious approach gained general support. The congress issued a call, “To the masses,” and set the goal of winning majority support in the working class before making a bid for power. Many of us in the party were not happy with that. Later on, this became known as united-front policy, and in the end most of us came around and supported it.

Debate on strategy

Back to the present: How can we explain this strange course of events, in which so much of Levi policy was adopted, while he was expelled from the International?

As a Marxist leader, Levi was unusually talented, but there was a one-sidedness in his personal abilities. His achievements in building the German Communist Party were made possible by the strength and cohesion of the team around him, which was also the team that worked with Rosa Luxemburg in building the Spartacus League during the war. In 1920, that team shattered, leaving Levi exposed and fatally undermining his position as central leader.

The decisive factor in this division was a debate on revolutionary strategy in Germany, rooted in the experience of workers there in 1919, a time when capitalism in Germany seemed near collapse.

The initial outlook of revolutionary socialists in Europe in 1919 was summarized by Leon Trotsky at the Comintern’s 1921 congress. When the Comintern was formed, it was hoped that workers’ “chaotic, spontaneous assault” would mount in “ever-rising waves … and that in this way the proletariat would attain state power in the course of one or two years,” Trotsky said.[1] But in Germany, by mid-1919, the first attempts to achieve workers’ power had been crushed, at great cost in workers’ lives, and the capitalist class had regained the upper hand.

Workers responded in two ways. The majority lapsed into pessimism, clinging to Social Democracy as their best defense against resurgent capitalism. A radical minority, however, rallied to the Communist Party, hoping it could relaunch the offensive against capitalism.

In these conditions, Paul Levi was a voice of caution. He warned against a premature showdown with the capitalist rulers, at a time when revolutionary-minded workers, although numbering in the hundreds of thousands, were still a small minority. He pressed Communists to take initiatives that were inclusive, aimed at restoring unity in action by the working class as a whole. This was not a new idea – it was rooted in the Bolshevik experience in Russia – but Levi was its outstanding proponent in Germany and in the Comintern as a whole.

Lessons of Hungarian revolution

In March 1919, Communists and Social Democrats formed a revolutionary coalition government in Hungary. The new regime, which declared itself a dictatorship of the proletariat, began to expropriate bourgeois property. But victory had not come to the workers through struggle, Levi pointed out; it had been handed to Communists by the collapse of bourgeois rule. He warned that taking power on this basis would lead to disastrous defeat.[2]

Levi cited here the founding principle of the German Communist Party, namely, that it “will never take governmental power except through the clear and unambiguous will of the great majority of proletarian masses in Germany, through their conscious agreement with the [Communists’] outlook, goals, and methods of struggle.”[3]

When bourgeois power collapsed in Hungary, Levi argued, the Communists would have done better to organize the proletariat through councils and win the councils to the perspective of a collective struggle for workers’ power.

The Hungarian revolutionary government survived only three months before being crushed by invading armies of the surrounding powers. It was replaced by a brutal military dictatorship.

Levi’s position on Hungary did not gain wide support in the Comintern. Many argued that the Hungarian revolutionary government could have won out if revolution had matured faster elsewhere. Karl Radek, the Comintern leader responsible for its relations with the German party, wrote that the existence of the Hungarian revolutionary government, even if brief, aided the Russian Soviet republic.[4]

Meanwhile, the German Communist movement was sharply divided between a wing headed by Levi, which favoured participating in elections and joining trade unions, and forces favouring a direct assault on capitalist power. Levi’s wing retained control, by a narrow margin, and imposed their policies on the party. However, the leftist opposition continued, now increasingly outside the party ranks.

Dispute over workers’ government

In March 1920, a united workers’ uprising in Germany overthrew a short-lived military coup, the so-called Kapp Putsch. A mighty general strike against the coup was called by the main German trade-union federation, which was led by Social Democrats hostile to revolution. The coup quickly collapsed, but the strike continued, as workers demanded decisive measures against future rightist threats. Desperate to get the workers back on the job, the union leadership called for an all-socialist government, formed of the workers’ political parties and the trade unions. The German Communist Party countered by saying that it would not take part in such a government, but would act toward it as a “loyal opposition,” provided the regime took serious measures against the rightists.

The statement aimed to link up with workers’ conviction that it was their unity that had defeated the putsch and advance a Communist perspective in that framework. The all-socialist government did not come into being, however. Communists divided on whether the German party’s response had been correct.

Levi did not write the “loyal opposition” statement (he was in jail at the time) but he gave it qualified support. However, the statement came under fierce attack from other leaders in the German party and also the International; Radek said the statement’s authors had renounced their historic mission as revolutionary leaders. Moreover, he claimed that the party’s opposition to putschism had led to passivity, a refusal to act, “a kind of quietism.”[5] This turned the criticism against Levi himself and his overall record as a party leader.

Béla Kun, who spoke with authority as the main leader of the failed Hungarian revolution, went further, arguing that the “unity ideal” expressed in the Kapp struggle was itself counterrevolutionary, and that a united front of the workers’ parties was a reactionary illusion.[6] This view had support in the German party as well.

The Comintern discussion that followed was complex and inconclusive – a half-opened debate, as Pierre Broué calls it.[7]

Division in the leadership

With regard to Paul Levi’s role, four points are important.

The leadership team built by Rosa Luxemburg divided, with central figures – Ernst Meyer, August Thalheimer, Heinrich Brandler, Hugo Eberlein – going over to an ultra-left position.

The Comintern leadership divided as well. Radek, Zinoviev, and others encouraged the leftist oppositionists, stressing the need for the German party to be more “active”. Meanwhile, Lenin’s writings were aligned strategically with Levi’s views.

The subsequent Second Congress of the Comintern did not discuss the Kapp experience and did not address the dispute related to it. But the congress did provide an occasion for some Comintern leaders to form a secret bloc with leaders of the ultra-leftist current in the German party.

The partisan intervention of Comintern leaders in the German dispute made it impossible for the German leadership to restore its unity through the lessons of own experience in Germany. Moscow’s involvement tended to freeze the German alignments.

The debate continued for a year, and is well described in Broué’s history, The German Revolution. Here I want only to underline the role played during the next year by the worker ranks in Germany.

During the year after the Kapp Putsch, the capitalist state continued to consolidate, and its repressive forces grew stronger. Living conditions were harsh. Workers were, in Clara Zetkin’s words, “almost desperate” yet “unwilling to struggle.” Meanwhile, a significant layer of revolutionary-minded workers, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, were moving to the left, inspired by the victories of the Soviet government and increasing in impatience and determination.

A leftist leader then arrayed against Levi later commented, “Everything was bogged down. We faced a wall of passivity. We had to break through it, whatever the cost.”

In discussion with Zetkin, Lenin referred to “discontented, suffering workers who feel revolutionary but are politically raw and confused…. World history does not seem to hurry, but [they] think that your party leaders don’t want it to hurry.”[8]

Pressures from the ranks

This mood of impatience gained increasing influence in the Communist Party as the months passed.

After the Kapp Putsch, an ultraleft party consolidated outside the Communist Party. The Communist Workers Party of Germany had about 50,000 members, strongly rooted in the factories, and it exerted a strong leftist pressure on the Communist Party ranks.

The Communist Party leadership often sought to restrain its trade-union forces from launching isolated struggles likely to lead to costly defeats. This policy of restraint was not popular among many in the party ranks.

Late in 1920, the Communist Party fused with the much larger left wing of the Independent Social Democrats, creating a united party with 350,000 members. In balance, however, these new forces increased the weight of impatience and adventurism within the united party.

In January 1921, the party adopted what later became known as a united front policy, pressing other currents in the workers’ movement to join in action for workers’ basic needs. Paul Levi was the prime mover of this initiative, which was a sharp change of course for the Communist Party. This policy did not bring any dramatic victories. It could only have been effective over time. It clashed with the belief of many members that bold action could bring workers’ power in the coming months.

All these tendencies strengthened the hand of Levi’s leftist opponents.

In February 1921, the ultralefts won a majority in the German Communist Party leadership. The stimulus came from a split in the Comintern’s Italian section, which was marked by an alignment of Moscow-based Comintern leaders, an ultraleft Communist current in Italy, and an impatient working-class minority similar to what was crystallizing in Germany. But even without that development, ultraleft pressures were increasing in the German party.

The following month, the German ultralefts launched an insurrectional general strike, the disastrous March Action, which launched the Communists into a confrontation not only with the state but with the working-class majority.

The destructive role of Moscow-based leaders in this drama needs an explanation. I see no evidence that they reflected ultraleft pressures from the Russian Communist party. Comintern leaders seem rather to have been adapting, with considerable vacillation and uncertainty, to the moods of impatient radical layers among Central European workers. Indeed, members of the Moscow Comintern leadership directly involved in the German and Italian events came from Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria, and Germany, not Russia. They were disoriented by the fact that a broad and impatient vanguard layer, made up of the best revolutionary forces in Germany as in Italy, was headed in a different direction from the rest of the mass movement.

Only a united and authoritative leadership in Germany could have persuaded that vanguard to struggle for unity with more conservative working-class forces. The Bolsheviks carried out that task successfully in Russia in 1917. The team built by Rosa Luxemburg, however, was shattered by the challenge. Once the team was broken, Paul Levi’s position was untenable, and his exit from the leadership was only a matter of time.

John Riddell gave the following talk as part of a panel on “Paul Levi and the German Socialist Movement” at the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, June 28, 2013. The other speakers at this session were Jen Roesch and Paul Kellogg.

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Do you have citations for these two key assertions about the Levi leadership of the KPD?

1. The Communist Party leadership often sought to restrain its trade-union forces from launching isolated struggles likely to lead to costly defeats. This policy of restraint was not popular among many in the party ranks.

2. Late in 1920, the Communist Party fused with the much larger left wing of the Independent Social Democrats, creating a united party with 350,000 members. In balance, however, these new forces increased the weight of impatience and adventurism within the united party.

On point 1, you could have a look at Larry Peterson, German Commnism, Workers’ Protest, and Labour Unions, Klewer 1993, pp. 61-69, especially the last two pages, and also Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten, Aufstand der Avantgarde, Campus Verlag 1986, pp. 97-99.

On point 2, see Broue, German Revolution, pp. 451-55, and Koch-Baumgarten, pp. 88, 91-92.

In addition to such evidence, I think both these points can be deduced by comparing the way the case for the Third International was argued at the Halle convention (see Lewis and Lih, Head to Head in Halle) and the course of the VKPD fusion convention (Broue 464-65) with the general conditions of struggle and relationship of class forces in Germany during this period.

The article raises many important questions, but it covers a lot of ground, and as a result leaves out some important issues. For instance, the March Action, which Levi called “the greatest Bakuninist putsch in history,” coincided in time with the Kronstadt revolt, and most probably was undertaken under the pressure of those sections of the Russian leadership who wanted to avoid the transition from war communism to the NEP. Historical Materialism will shortly publish an article containing English versions of: 1) Levi’s ‘Heidelberg Theses’ (24 October 1919) against the anti-union, anti-elections ultra-left that later formed the KAPD, 2) the ‘Declaration of Loyal Opposition’ (23 March 1920) published during the Kapp putsch, which is exactly what the Bolsheviks did during the Kornilov putsch, and 3) the ‘Open Letter’ (8 January 1921), which, as you mentioned, for the first time launched the united-front policy outside the ranks of the Russian CP. Those initiatives were much criticised, but they were all fully endorsed by Lenin. In the meantime, there are a couple of books people interested in this key period of the history of Communism should consult. The first is “Zinoviev and Martov: Head to head in Halle”, with introductory essays by Ben Lewis and Lars T Lih. London: November Publications, 2011. The October 1920 Halle congress of the USPD had to decide the fate of an organization with 700,000 mostly working-class members and over 50 daily newspapers. Levi’s whole campaign leading up to and during the congress was a huge triumph for the Communist International, and I don’t agree with your assessment that “in balance these new forces increased the weight of impatience and adventurism within the united party.” You seem to forget the numerical and political weakness of the old KPD(S), which boycotted the elections to the constituent assembly, joined a hopeless spontaneous revolt in January 1919, etc. The second book is the anthology of Levi’s writings issued by Brill and reprinted by Haymarket: In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi, edited and introduced by David Fernbach, Leiden: Brill, 2011. It shows Levi in his heroic period and then slowly going back to Social Democracy, much like the right-wing of the USPD that split at Halle had done before. But see Lenin’s final assessment of him: “During the intimate conferences on the events of March 1921 in Germany, Lenin said about Levi, “The man has lost his head entirely.” True, Lenin immediately added slyly, “He, at least, had something to lose; one can’t even say that about the others” (Leon Trotsky, What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1932, p. 103).

Thank you Daniel, for you comments on several important topics. The Historical Materialism collection of Paul Levi-related material will be a major contribution, and you are right to highlight the book on the Halle congress and the collection of Levi’s writings.

Another collection of documents relating to Paul Levi will be published next year in the form of an appendix to my edition of the Communist International’s Third Congress.

Daniel, you are in good company in suggesting that the March Action “most probably was undertaken under the pressure of those sections of the Russian leadership who wanted to avoid the transition from war communism to the NEP.” True, the March Action came too early to be a reaction to the Kronstadt revolt and too late to be a last-ditch effort to avert the NEP. But the ultra-left offensive in Germany followed on several months of nudges and shoves by members of the Moscow-based Comintern Executive Committee seeking to “activate” the German party. Were they put up to this by an anti-NEP wing of the Russian leadership?

Certainly, this explanation would explain a great deal that otherwise seems puzzling. What does the historical record show?

I have not found any evidence to sustain this thesis: no sign that there was significant differentiation in the Russian leadership over the NEP decision; no record of divided leadership votes or contentious discussion on this issue.

True, there are many statements by comrades on every side of this discussion that the situation in Russia is difficult and a victory in Germany — even if partial — would render the Soviet government practical assistance. This was a commonplace of Communist politics at that time. Not only Radek and Bela Kun but also Levi and Clara Zetkin made this point. The Levi leadership launched a campaign to achieve this goal, and in a perverse way, the March Action was its continuation. But what tactical policy could bring such a victory? That was the question on which leading comrades divided in both Germany and Russia.

Given the absence of evidence that the course of events was shaped by the Russian party leadership, we should at least consider the possibility that forces in Central Europe may have played the determining role.

However, my knowledge of Bolshevik history at that time is limited, and I may have missed something. I would be very grateful for any information that helps us better understand the Bolshevik leadership’s role in the German events.

“Lenin noted in December [1920] that ‘the tempo of development of revolution in the capitalist countries’ was ‘far slower’ than it had been in Russia. [V.I. Lenin, ‘Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Activists of the Moscow Organisation of the RCP(B)’, Collected Works, Volume 31, p. 441.] But Zinoviev was telling the Italian Socialists that the proletarian revolution was imminent. [R. Paris, Histoire du fascisme en Italie, Volume 1, Paris, 1962, p. 202.] Perhaps he was convinced that a revolutionary victory on the part of the parties of the International would ensure that Russia could avoid having to initiate the NEP, which he accepted only reluctantly after having vigorously opposed it in the Russian Political Bureau. [See the careful discussion on this point in E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Volume 3, London, 1952, pp. 337–8.].” (Pierre Broue, The German Revolution 1917-1923, pp. 459-60.)

While I cannot assess Daniel Gaido’s specific historical claims about the relationship of those in the Bolshevik Party who may have opposed the introduction of the New Economic Policy to the German ultra-lefts, it is clear to me that the leadership of the ECCI was attempting to “hot-house” revolutionary situations in capitalist Europe. Ultimately, one’s assessment of the Comintern’s handling of the “Levi Affair” should not focus (as did Broue’s otherwise excellent The German Revolution) on Levi’s personal and/or leadership qualities. Two challenges faced the new Communist Parties outside of Russia. The first was to forge leaderships as rooted in their national realities as the Bolsheviks had been in Russian reality. The second was elaborating a strategy for the Communists to move from being the party of the militant minority—real workers’ vanguard—to winning the majority of the class to revolutionary politics. In terms of these challenges, the Comintern’s handling of the Marzaktion and the expulsion of Levi was a complete disaster. Not only was the most articulate advocate of the united front—the key to “winning the masses”—condemned and excluded from the Communist movement, but the German party—the largest outside of Russia—was saddled with a leadership that looked to the Bolsheviks for tactical advice. The KPD and German working class (and global working class in the forms of Stalinism and fascism) paid, in my opinion, a very high price for this in 1923.

I have been active in the revolutionary socialist movement in Canada, the United States and Europe since the 1960s. This blog features my current articles and some of my past writings that still seem relevant.
I welcome constructive criticism and discussion; please read the Comments Policy before posting. --John Riddell